Economy

Just days after a May Day strike sent tens of thousands of people to the streets in a protest that turned violent, people gathered at work, in parks and their homes in never-ending debates over the uncertainties. At the Río Piedras terminal where Mr. Rivera works, the drivers and cleaning crews huddled to gripe about waning business and pensions, as well as ever-rising fees and water and electricity bills.

Seth F. had worked for TaskRabbit for three years, he told me as he climbed onto my kitchen stool—“like twenty-one years in normal job time.” In college, he had sold a screenplay to Columbia Pictures, and the film, though never made, launched his career. He wrote movies for nine years, and was well paid and sought after, but none of his credited work made it to the big screen, so he took a job as a senior editor at Genre, a now defunct gay magazine, where he covered the entertainment industry. He liked magazine work, but was not a true believer. “I’m one of those people, I think, who has to change jobs frequently,” he told me. He got a master’s degree in education, and taught fourth grade at Spence and at Brooklyn Friends. Fourteen years in, a health condition flared up, leaving his calendar checkered with days when it was hard to work. He’d aways found peculiar joy in putting together ikea furniture, so he hired himself out as an assembly wiz: easy labor that paid the bills while he got better. He landed on TaskRabbit.

Luxury goods sales in the U.S. have been hurting for the last few years, and nobody is more ticked off than Swiss watchmakers. Not only do they have to compete against Fitbits and Apple watches, but the centuries-old industry is fighting for a declining slice of disposable American income. A massive tax cut coupled with a strong dollar could be a boon for for the Swiss, but only if the luxury imports can skirt any new protectionist Trump trade policies, the Financial Times reports.

The oppositional dialectic content and theme of the internet stood apart from the everyday normal world which most existed within. The nightly news was so different from what was on the web that the disorganized masses began to divide into different factions. Some divided themselves from who they wanted to be and who they really were. This personal allowance and distortion has evolved into the social media phenomenon which we experience now.

Perhaps the scariest thing about something like the Total Information Awareness Office is not merely that it was proposed in the first place, or that it incorporated such blatantly creepy Orwellian imagery to convey its true nature and purpose, but that, as we sit here 10 years later, and as the core functions of the TIA office are now being openly performed by the NSA, DHS and other governmental agencies, people are now actively making excuses for this nightmarish police state.

Lawrence Weschler, a writer of considerable mainstream prestige, is sick of prevaricating about Israel. It’s rabid. It has rabies. And Gaza is a concentration camp. Weschler has let loose chiefly because of the “remorseless” and “repetitively compulsive” aspect of Israeli violence. I believe that understanding is now widely shared in the liberal mainstream, and interventions like Weschler’s make it easier for others to speak up.

While President Trump has promised the triumphant return of the coal industry and has already made efforts to scale back environmental regulations that limit the coal companies’ methods of extraction and processing, this in no way guarantees a steady future for West Virginia or other coal-dependent Appalachian states.

Since the first reports of dead and dying honey bee colonies began to stream in, scientists have scrambled to determine the cause, or causes, of CCD. One threat in particular stood out as a major cause of honey bee declines: varroa mites (Varroa destructor). These tiny parasitic arachnids weaken adult and juvenile bees by sucking their blood. They also transmit a number of viruses that can spread throughout a colony like wildfire. To make matters worse, the mites reproduce quickly and, because of this, can rapidly evolve resistance to traditional chemical pesticides.

Gold & Silver

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